Architect Donald C. Smith, former partner at SOM, died on May 30, 2014, at his home in West Palm Beach, Florida. He was 84 years old.
Smith began working at SOM as a draftsman after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a Masters of Architecture in 1961. Rising quickly within the New York office, Smith became an Associate in 1963, an Associate Partner in 1965, and a Partner in 1969. In 1972, Smith helped establish the firm’s Denver office. He continued to work out of both offices until 1992, serving the firm in design and management roles, and as a member of the Partner Committee.
Throughout his more than three decades at the firm, Smith contributed to some of SOM’s most complex and challenging projects in New York City. At the beginning of his career, Smith worked closely with Roy Allen on the American Bible Society headquarters on Broadway, a strikingly modern concrete tower housing a trove of historic Biblical works. Further downtown, Smith helped design Merrill Hall, an administrative office and classroom complex for the Institute of Finance at New York University. Sheathed in African black granite, the 16-story building was designed to harmonize with the surrounding urban fabric.
Later, Smith served as the Design Partner in charge of Vista International Hotel in the city’s Financial District, a 534,000-square-foot tower originally designed with 450 rooms. In response to the dynamic growth of Lower Manhattan at the time, Smith and his team expertly reengineered the structure, mid-construction, to accommodate 825 rooms by the time the hotel opened in 1981. Smith also brought his design expertise to the suburbs, working on projects such as the General Reinsurance Company in Greenwich, Connecticut, alongside fellow SOM architect J. Walter Severinghaus.
In the mid-1980s, Smith served as the Managing Partner for Merrill Lynch’s Consolidation and Relocation Plan. The Merrill Lynch plan was a massive coordination effort that involved relocating approximately 14,000 employees into four million square feet of office space in two buildings at New York’s World Financial Center. Under Smith’s management, SOM provided a comprehensive range of services, beginning with programming and planning and culminating in interior architecture.
Smith’s designs also made a palpable impact across North America and in three locations in particular: Minnesota, Colorado, and Ontario. Notable projects include St. Paul Town Square (1980), a vibrant hub of commercial, civic, and recreational space in the capital’s downtown, Republic Plaza (1984), which remains the tallest building in Denver, and BCE Place (1991), a mixed-use complex consisting of three shimmering towers that established a new sense of scale and visual dynamism in Toronto.
Though his work ranged in scale from master plans to single buildings, Smith remained unfailingly committed to fulfilling architecture’s chief goal of inspiring and delighting its inhabitants. “People should be able to enjoy buildings like they do any other piece of sculpture. Because it really is the finest art,” Smith once said. “It should be terrific from the street and it should be terrific inside.”
This process of bringing about joy through shaping spaces large and small was Smith’s lifelong passion.“I don’t take a vacation very often because I’m on vacation every day,” he said in an interview in the early 1980s. “You know, this is fun for me. I hope that’s what everybody else does.”
Before beginning his schooling and career in architecture, Smith served as a company commander for the U.S. Army in Korea. Discharged as a captain, he attended the University of Cincinnati as an undergraduate on the G.I. Bill. Smith was born in Fostoria, Ohio, in 1929.
Read an announcement about Smith’s death in the New York Times.